Navigation split into three tiers instead of one flat row of 10 items: a persistent header CTA (Get help / make a referral), a utility bar (About, Contact, For schools/agencies/professionals) and a primary nav of 6 items plus Home. Ten items in one row exceeded the 5–7 item range generally recommended for scannable top-level navigation, and would have slowed down exactly the audience — people in crisis — who most need speed.
"Get help / make a referral" moved out of the nav entirely into a persistent header element, because it was named the single most important homepage action (Q2) and functions as a cross-page utility, not a destination competing with six other tabs.
The five service categories plus Resources form primary nav because they are genuine task-led, audience-facing destinations that most visitors come for; About, Contact and For schools/agencies/professionals are lower-frequency, non-crisis destinations and sit better in a secondary utility bar.
Trade-off flagged: demoting "For schools, agencies and professionals" to the utility bar reduces its visual prominence. Q4 names professional referral guidance as a distinct, important need, so recommend a quick tree-test with a few referrer contacts before finalising this placement.
Counselling and mental wellbeing stays in primary nav as its own destination but heavily cross-linked, because it spans several very different contract types and a single silo would misrepresent it (Jo, discovery notes).
No staff or counsellor photography appears anywhere in this IA, a firm content rule driven by privacy (contracted ACC counsellors) and safety (small-community recognition risk), not a design preference.
Testimonials are treated as a reusable content block placed sensitively across Home and relevant service pages, not as a "good news stories" nav item or standalone page. This is sensitive design and copywriting work (anonymised, outcome-focused), not an information architecture decision, so it is deliberately absent from the navigation structure itself.
This sitemap is provisional against the final, leadership-confirmed services list (in progress with Jane) and the still-unfinalised service-grouping advice — treat as a working draft, not a final structure.